Some Things Are Worse Than Paying Taxes

In the decades after the Civil War, federal taxes and spending in the U.S. were about one-sixth or one-seventh as high as they are now as a percentage of gross domestic product.8697 But that doesn’t really mean government was only one-sixth or one-seventh as big as it is now.

For one thing, the U.S. government gave away hundreds of millions of acres of federal land in those days in small grants to homesteaders and giant ones to railroad companies — big expenditures of government resources that don’t show up in the spending statistics. For another, the second half of the 19th century was a heyday in the U.S. of what Stanford historian Richard White calls “fee-based governance.” Here’s a description of the practice from White’s “The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States During Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896,” a 2017 book that I’ve already gushed about in this column: